Author: Ben Debski

On October 11th, 2001, one month after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W. Bush faced a terrifying prospect. At that morning’s daily presidential intelligence briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president of reports from a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire that al-Qaeda terrorists possessed a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, the weapon was in New York City.

The government dispatched a nuclear-emergency support team. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these experts searched for the bomb. On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of Times Square. A noon detonation in midtown Manhattan would kill them all. The wounded would overwhelm hospitals and emergency services. Firemen would fight a ring of uncontrolled blazes for days afterward.

In the hours that followed, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security advisor, analysed what strategists call the “problem from hell.” During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each knew that an attack against the other would elicit a retaliatory strike of commensurate or greater measure; but al-Qaeda had no such fear of reprisal.

Concerned that al-Qaeda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon into Washington as well, the president ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to leave the capital for an “undisclosed location,” where he would remain for weeks. Several hundred federal employees from more than a dozen government agencies joined the vice president at this secret site – the core of an alternative government.

Six months earlier, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had picked up chatter in al∞Qaeda channels about an “American Hiroshima.” The CIA knew that Osama bin Laden’s fascination with nuclear weapons went back at least to 1993, when he attempted to buy highly enriched uranium of South African origin. Al∞Qaeda operatives were alleged to have negotiated with Chechen separatists in Russia to buy a nuclear warhead, which the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed to have acquired from Russian arsenals. The CIA’s special task force on al-Qaeda had noted the terrorist group’s emphasis on thorough planning, intensive training, and repetition of successful tactics. The task force highlighted al-Qaeda’s preference for symbolic targets and spectacular attacks.

As CIA analysts examined Dragonfire’s report and compared it with other bits of information, they noted that the September attack on the World Trade Center had set the bar higher for future terrorist acts. Psychologically, a nuclear attack would stagger the world’s imagination. New York was, in the jargon of national-security experts, “target∞rich.”

As it turned out, of course, Dragonfire’s report was a false alarm. But what the case teaches us is this: the US government was unable to dismiss the possibility of such an attack on any scientific or logical grounds.

Preventing nuclear catastrophe
Given current policies and practices, a nuclear terrorist attack that devastates one of the great cities of the world is inevitable. In my judgment, if governments do no more and no less than they are doing today, the odds of such an event within a decade are more than 50 percent.

This estimate is, in effect, my best guess, since there is no methodology for predicting an unpredictable catastrophe. But my judgment is informed by having analysed issues of nuclear danger for more than three decades, during which I served as a special advisor to US secretary of defence, Caspar Weinberger in the Reagan administration and as assistant secretary of defence for policy and plans in the Clinton administration.

Others have offered more conservative but still dire assessments. My Harvard colleague Matthew Bunn has created a model that estimates the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent – identical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar in 2005.

Still others are more pessimistic than I. Former secretary of defence William Perry, for one, has suggested that my work underestimates the risk. Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb (whom the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi called “the only true genius I had ever met”), told Congress in March 2007 that he estimated a “20 percent per year probability” of a nuclear explosion in an American or European city. And Warren Buffett, the world’s most successful investor and a legendary oddsmaker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events, concludes that nuclear terrorism is “inevitable.” He has said, “I don’t see any way that it won’t happen.”

But there is some good news: nuclear terrorism is nonetheless preventable. There are feasible, affordable measures that, if taken, would reduce the likelihood of a successful nuclear terrorist attack
to nearly zero.

The centrepiece of a strategy to prevent nuclear terrorism must be to deny terrorists access to nuclear weapons or materials. To this end, my 2004 book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, proposes a strategy for shaping a new international security order according to a doctrine of “Three No’s”:

• No loose nukes: all nuclear weapons and weapons∞usable material must be secured, on the fastest possible timetable, as tightly as the gold in Fort Knox.

• No new nascent nukes: no nation must develop new capabilities to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium.

• No new nuclear-weapons states: we must draw a line under the current eight and a half nuclear powers and say unambiguously, “Stop. No more.”

In the last 17 years, efforts have been made to address the threat. The danger of “loose nukes” came into focus in 1991, during the Soviet Union’s collapse. After the failed coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, I composed a private memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, titled “Sounding the Alarm.” “Soviet disunion could create additional nuclear states, provoke struggles for control of Soviet nuclear weapons, and lead to a loss of control of strategic or nonstrategic nuclear weapons,” I wrote.

In the weeks that followed, President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev agreed to what was later called the “unilateral declarations.” The United States removed all tactical nuclear weapons from its operational forces and challenged the Soviet Union to do likewise.

Gorbachev’s response was encouraging. With the aid of US funding, secured through the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program sponsored by Lugar and his Senate colleague Sam Nunn, thousands of the Soviet Union’s 21,700 tactical nuclear weapons stationed in 14 of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics were returned to Russia. Moreover, 3,200 strategic nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, most atop missiles that targeted American cities, were eliminated. Today, there are no nuclear weapons in any of the former Soviet states except Russia.

By now, US-sponsored security upgrades have been completed for 80 percent of Russia’s nuclear material and warhead sites. As of June 2008, 7,292 strategic nuclear warheads had been deactivated (79 percent of the Nunn-Lugar target for 2012), and 708 intercontinental ballistic missiles had been destroyed (65 percent of the 2012 target), along with 30 nuclear submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles (86 percent of the 2012 target). Several of the 2012 targets have already been met, and 25 classified sites on 12 Russian bases have been secured two years ahead of schedule.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, in the first televised debate between President George Bush and Senator John Kerry, the moderator asked each candidate, “What is the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States?” In rare agreement, Kerry and Bush both cited nuclear terrorism. As the president said, “I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing the country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network.” During the 2005 Bratislava summit, President Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin for the first time accepted responsibility for addressing the threat and for ensuring that their governments secure loose nuclear material in their countries as quickly as possible. They assigned responsibility for securing nuclear materials to individuals (US energy secretary Samuel W. Bodman and his Russian counterpart, the head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency) and held them accountable by requiring regular progress reports.

But the missteps, missed opportunities, and wrong turns of the past two decades are weightier than the successes. The nuclear superpowers failed to take advantage of the end of the Cold War to dramatically reduce and restructure nuclear arsenals – or, at least, to honour their commitments under the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) rigorously enough to persuade other states to honour theirs. India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs and began deploying active nuclear arsenals. North Korea withdrew from the NPT, used technologies acquired under the treaty to produce plutonium for an estimated eight nuclear bombs, and tested a nuclear weapon. In 2005, an NPT review conference collapsed amid general intransigence. Most recently, Iran has defied three UN Security Council resolutions demanding that it suspend its nuclear enrichment activity.

Of everything on this list, the most worrying is nuclear proliferation in North Korea. That country is among the most dangerous potential sources of a nuclear bomb that Osama bin Laden, or someone like him, could use to destroy the heart of New York or Washington, DC. In 2004, Pyongyang had two bombs’ worth of plutonium. It has since developed an arsenal of around 10 bombs.

As the 2004 UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change concluded, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

After the United States invaded Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, the Taliban government was toppled and al-Qaeda’s headquarters and leadership, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al∞Zawahiri, were evicted from the country. But note the supreme irony: having entered office with a bearded madman in medieval Afghanistan plotting and training foot soldiers for a massive terrorist attack on the United States, President Bush will probably hand the reins to his successor as this same bearded madman plots even deadlier attacks on our country – but now he will be plotting them from training camps in Pakistan, a nuclear state.

No one who has examined the evidence has any doubt that al Qaeda is deadly serious about exploding a nuclear bomb. As former CIA director George Tenet reveals in his memoir, “The most senior leaders of al Qaeda are still singularly focused on acquiring WMD… The main threat is the nuclear one. I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden and his operatives desperately want to go.”

Consider the consequences if just one nuclear bomb exploded in just one US city. The immediate reaction would be to block all entry points to prevent another bomb from reaching its target, disrupting the global flow of raw materials and manufactured goods. Vital markets for international products would disappear, and financial markets would crash. Researchers at Rand, a think tank funded by the US government, have estimated that a nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach, CA, would cause immediate indirect costs of more than $1trn worldwide and that shutting down US ports would cut world trade by 7.5 percent.

The total, long-term economic effects would be much worse, however, and would reverberate well beyond the developed world. As former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has warned, a nuclear terrorist attack would not only “cause widespread death and destruction” but “thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty.” This would, he observed, create “a second death toll throughout the developing world.”

Preventing such a calamity will require policy leadership, institutional innovation, international cooperation, and hard work. The prospects for success can be enhanced by capitalising on a competitive advantage of the United States: technology. Al-Qaeda and other global terrorists are technologically challenged, and technologically advanced countries must exploit this asymmetry. If we do, our ability to secure, trace, and dismantle weapons of mass destruction will exceed terrorist organisations’ abilities to procure them.

Nuclear CSI: Unambiguous attribution
Could states be held as accountable for the nuclear weapons they create (and the material from which such weapons could be made) as they are for the nuclear warheads their governments choose to deploy? The US government considered this question during the Cold War – and answered it, though the answer offers cold comfort. Recall the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The United States discovered the Soviet Union attempting to sneak nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba. President John F. Kennedy confronted his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, and demanded that the missiles be withdrawn. As the crisis unfolded, American strategists worried that Khrushchev might transfer control of the nuclear arsenal in Cuba to a young, hot∞headed revolutionary named Fidel Castro.

After conducting careful deliberations, Kennedy issued an unambiguous warning to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union: “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev well understood what Kennedy was talking about: the certain prospect of a full∞scale nuclear war.

In the years after the crisis, nuclear strategists considered the array of scenarios in which one or a small number of Soviet nuclear weapons might explode on American soil. In one such scenario, a single missile is launched against an American city in an attack the Soviet leader claims is “accidental” or “unauthorised.” For example, a Soviet leader calls the American president on the hotline to inform him that a Soviet missile commander has gone insane and, without authorisation, launched a single missile with a nuclear warhead against an American city. How should the president respond?

Grisly though the logic was, the canonical answer was a strategy of “an eye for an eye.” Herman Kahn, author of the controversial 1960 work On Thermonuclear War, described this approach as “graduated, or controlled deterrence… of provocative actions by a counteraction which is expected to be so effective that the net effect of the ‘aggressor’s’ action is to cause him to lose in position.” The US plan was to retaliate by delivering a nuclear warhead capable of destroying a counterpart Russian city. Pentagon planners developed lists of such unfortunately twinned cities in support of that policy.

Who knows whether an American president would have responded to the accidental destruction of Minneapolis by destroying Minsk. But Soviet leaders’ belief that a president might do so undoubtedly reinforced their determination that no accidental launches occur.

Modern deterrence
As one moves beyond Cold War logic to the crueller, more complex logic of nuclear terrorism, the question is whether personal accountability for terrorist use of a nuclear weapon manufactured by a given state can deter the state’s leader from selling weapons to terrorists. What’s more, the question of accountability applies equally well in cases where proliferation is not wilful. If leaders believe that they will be held accountable for their nuclear weapons even if those weapons are stolen, will they be better motivated to prevent theft?

The answer depends on two further questions. First, can we attribute the weapon to its source? Second, how will accountability be defined politically, and how can it be enforced?

As I wrote in MIT Technology Review in the summer of 2005, “The technological prerequisite for rethinking the unthinkable is nuclear forensics: the ability to identify a bomb’s source from radioactive debris left after it explodes.” A credible capacity to identify nuclear material definitively and quickly is essential. If the leader of a government – say, Kim Jong Il of North Korea – knew that the United States would be able to identify his “fingerprints” on a nuclear weapon he sold to terrorists, it should be a useful deterrent. Similarly, nuclear custodians, scientists, and others whose main motivation for helping terrorists is financial, not ideological, would probably be more hesitant to do so if they could be found out.

A post-9/11 study by the National Research Council (NRC), Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism, concludes that such detection is technically feasible: “The technology for developing [post-explosion nuclear attribution] exists but needs to be assembled, an effort that is expected to take several years.”

Nuclear Forensics: Role, State of the Art, Program Needs, a 2008 study by the Joint Working Group of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that is the best recent public report on the subject, concurs with the NRC’s judgment: “The underlying scientific disciplines… are understood adequately for the purpose of forensics.” Nevertheless, the report concludes that the current state of the art will not yield maximally effective deterrence. We lack a central global database of unique material signatures that countries can promptly access in the event of a nuclear detonation.

Even if such a database existed, states would not be fully prepared to take advantage of it in a day-after scenario. The APS and AAAS report that “neither equipment nor people are at the level needed to provide as prompt and accurate information for decision makers as is possible.”

The report suggests that two separate technological initiatives are critical to improving US forensic capability. The first is the development of equipment that can provide immediate, rough assessments in the field – portable instruments capable of what the APS and AAAS call “all-weather, all-scenario rapid response.”

The second is improvement of equipment for performing more detailed analysis of forensic samples. According to the report, the equipment in the US Department of Energy’s labs must be upgraded to “world standards.”

Assuming that there is an attack and we have identified the source, we come to the much more difficult question. What response is appropriate?

A global alliance
Establishing an accepted principle of nuclear accountability will be a major international undertaking. It should begin with the United States and Russia, each of which has a special obligation to address this challenge, since they created it – and since they still own 95 percent of all nuclear weapons. They should take the lead in establishing a new global alliance against nuclear terrorism.

The mission of the alliance should be to minimise the risk of such terrorism anywhere by taking every action physically, technically, and diplomatically possible to prevent nuclear weapons or materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Membership in the alliance would require an unambiguous commitment to the principle of assured nuclear security. States would have to guarantee that all nuclear weapons and materials in their territories were beyond the reach of terrorists or thieves. And states’ means of securing these materials would have to be sufficiently transparent that leaders of all member states could reassure their own citizens that terrorists would never get a nuclear bomb from another alliance member.

UN Security Council Resolution 1540 already obligates all member states to develop and maintain “appropriate, effective” measures to secure weapons and materials, but this obligation has unfortunately not been reinforced by specific, mandatory standards.

However, the Nunn-Lugar Expansion Act, adopted by Congress in 2003, authorised the Nunn-Lugar programme to operate outside the former Soviet Union to address proliferation threats. Moreover, the Bush administration has reportedly provided $100m in technology and related assistance to help Pakistan secure its vulnerable nuclear arsenal.

The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism announced by Presidents Bush and Putin at the St. Petersburg G8 summit in July 2006 was another step in the right direction. But the alliance against nuclear terrorism that I am proposing would go beyond declarations; it would require specific actions in exchange for specific benefits. The actions would include defining the security levels of weapons and weapons-usable materials, as well as assuring others that these levels of security had been achieved. Leaders of complying states would participate in an annual summit, and full alliance members would also be entitled to intelligence sharing, assistance with security technology, participation in interdiction exercises, and post-detonation medical and cleanup aid.

The leader of a country that joined the alliance would have to take responsibility for the country’s doing everything technically possible, as fast as possible, to prevent nuclear terrorism. Meanwhile, member states would be required to deposit samples of nuclear materials in an international library that would be available for use in identifying the source of any weapon or material that found its way into terrorists’ hands.

Members of the alliance would together clarify the practical meaning of accountability in the event that a weapon or material was used by terrorists against another state. If nuclear weapons or materials should be stolen, states that had satisfied the requirements for assured nuclear security, met the new standards in securing their materials, and made their safeguards sufficiently transparent to the other members would be judged less negligent. States that were unwilling to participate fully in the alliance would automatically raise suspicions.

Members of the alliance would also undertake to clarify the consequences of knowingly allowing nuclear materials to fall into terrorist hands. Those consequences would not necessarily involve military retaliation; alternatives such as exacting financial reparations would certainly be explored and might prove more realistic. Consequences would also be different for different violators, since threatening nuclear retaliation against Russia would not be credible.

Currently, the only state that could plausibly choose to sell a nuclear bomb to terrorists is North Korea. Since it may have 10 weapons, the sale of one or two would make little difference to its deterrent posture. An economically desperate mafioso state, North Korea has demonstrated a willingness to sell whatever it makes to whoever will pay.

To deter Kim Jong Il from selling a nuclear weapon to terrorists, the US government should act now to convince him that North Korea will be held accountable for every weapon of North Korean origin. Ideally, the United States would act in concert with Russia and China in taking a page from John F. Kennedy’s playbook during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The announced policy of nuclear accountability would warn Kim unambiguously that the explosion of any nuclear weapon of North Korean origin on the territory of alliance states or their allies would be met with a full retaliatory response ensuring that it could never happen again.

Success in the war on terrorism will require a combination of policy imagination and technological inventiveness. Visualising the alternative – a world of nuclear anarchy – should stimulate us to rethink nuclear unthinkables.

Closer to home, the US has allotted $44m a month to help the governments of its closest neighbours – Mexico and Central America – assert their authority, fight corruption and set up functioning institutions.

The two cases raise questions about American priorities. If money were the only gauge, one might draw the conclusion that it is 147 times more important for Washington to bring security and good governance to Afghanistan than to America’s violence-plagued next-door neighbours – Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez alone, 6,000 people have died in the past two and a half years, a number that dwarfs the military death toll of Afghanistan since the war there began in 2001. Central America, according to a UN report, has become the region with the world’s highest murder rate, an average of about 1,300 a month.

Official statistics list 4,635 murders in El Salvador in 2009. Honduras notched up 5,265 and Guatemala 6,498. Mexico topped the 2009 list with almost 8,000. Since President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug trafficking organisations in December 2006, more than 25,000 people have been killed.

Most of the blood-letting is blamed on drug traffickers fighting each other and the state, and on armed disputes between rival criminal gangs. To help the governments in America’s backyard tramp down the violence, then President George W Bush signed into law, in June 2008, a three-year $1.6bn security cooperation agreement, the so-called Merida Initiative. (So named after the Mexican city where it was hatched).

What effect has it had, so far? Virtually zero, largely because very little of the assistance in training and equipment the US promised has been delivered. In July, a report by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of congress, found that just nine percent of the agreed total had been “expended.”

“Deliveries of equipment and training have been delayed by challenges associated with insufficient number of staff to administer the programme, negotiations on interagency and bilateral agreements, procurement processes, changes in government, and funding availability,” the GAO said. In other words: things got stuck in red tape.

Bleak memories of past efforts

But even once all the aid – from helicopters and drug sniffing dogs to X-ray scanning devices and police training is dispensed – there is reason to doubt that the programme will make much of a difference either to the flow of drugs to the US or to the violence tearing at the fabric of society in Mexico and Central America.

Like most initiatives since Richard Nixon first declared “war on drugs” 39 years ago, Merida is heavy on equipment and geared more towards tactical victories in suppressing the cultivation and flow of drugs than on the long-term reforms that would make government institutions, most of all the justice systems, corruption-resistant.

The Merida initiative evokes memories of US-Mexican anti-drug efforts in the late 1990s, when Mexico was also torn by a wave of violence as rival cartels fought for dominance. Then as now, the military were seen as less prone to corruption and abuse than the police. Then as now, this is a questionable assumption.

In the 1990s, the US provided a large fleet of helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and other equipment. It trained thousands of Mexican special forces to attack the drug networks. An army general, Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, became Mexico’s drug czar. He was arrested a year later and tried for working for the drug lords he was supposed to fight.

That the latest programme does not quite capture the complex nature of the problem is apparent from its title: The Merida Initiative to Combat Illicit Narcotics and Reduce Organised Crime. Both illicit drugs and organised crime play a major role in the Mexican and Central American mayhem but they are not the only forces.

Common crime is up throughout the region – from robbery and rape to extortion, car theft and kidnapping for ransom. In a climate of criminal anarchy, life is cheap, arrests are rare, and impunity is the rule rather than the exception.

This is not how President Calderon tells it. According to him, 90 percent of the dead are connected to drug organisations – bad people killing bad people. One Mexican army general, Jorge Juarez Loera, echoed the thought and phrased it differently. Reporters covering the killings should refer to “one less criminal” instead of “one more murder victim.”

Charles Bowden, the author of Murder City, a gripping book on the decline of Ciudad Juarez into a killing field, scoffs at such assertions. “Most of the murder victims (in Juarez) are ordinary Mexicans who magically morph into drug cartel members before their blood dries where they fall dead, riddled with bullets.” Is there an end in sight?

Bowden’s reply: “I don’t see any way to put the lid back on.”

They said Castro appeared to be moving to put aside an issue that has long damaged Cuba’s international image, trade and diplomatic relations to the detriment of its economy.

“I think the prisoners are being released for a combination of reasons, but all related to the need for tourism, trade and investment to alleviate the economic catastrophe that Cuba is sliding into,” Miami-based attorney Timothy Ashby told reporters.

“The prisoners, especially the hunger strikers, are an international embarrassment and complicate relations with trading partners,” said Ashby, formerly a U.S. Commerce Department official in charge of trade with Cuba and the Caribbean.

The immediate goals, he said, may be to send a positive signal to the U.S. and Europe, where key decisions affecting Cuba could be made in coming months.

Cuba wants the U.S. Congress to pass a pending bill that would end a longstanding ban on Americans traveling to the island – part of a 48-year-old U.S. trade embargo – which could bring a flood of U.S. tourists and much needed revenues to the cash-strapped island.

Recent visiting U.S. trade delegations said Cuban officials had urged them to go back and lobby for the bill’s passage.

Castro has sought improved relations with the EU and pushed for the group to amend its common position, which ties full economic cooperation to the release of political prisoners and improved human rights.

His hopes for a change earlier this year, when Spain led the 27-nation bloc, were dashed by human rights controversies, but the EU is to revisit the issue in September.

Struggling Cuban economy
Castro “surely knows that a substantial prisoner release is likely to draw a reaction from Washington and Europe, as it should,” said Phil Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute think tank in Arlington, Virginia.

The Cuban leader, who succeeded his older brother Fidel Castro as president in 2008, has his hands full trying to modernise Cuba’s economy, battered by damaging hurricanes, the global financial crisis and chronic inefficiencies.

He has taken small steps toward economic reform and there have been hints of larger ones to come.

But since February 23, when imprisoned dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in a hunger strike seeking better jail conditions, Cuba has been widely condemned for its human rights record.

Zapata’s death was followed immediately by a long, life-threatening hunger strike by dissident Guillermo Farinas. Government-directed harassment of the dissident “Ladies in White” group during March and April marches by the women also added to the international criticism of Cuban authorities.

Both Farinas and the Ladies in White were demanding the release of prisoners included in the 52 to be freed.

The prisoner release has, for now, quieted foreign critics and may help Castro focus on economic improvement, said Anya Landau French, a Cuba expert at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington.

“Why is Raul doing this? It could be because of internal or external backlash, or to get a distraction off their plate while they focus on the economy,” she said.

Reaction against stagnation
Farinas ended his hunger strike the day after the releases were announced. Ladies in White leader Laura Pollan said that the group will continue its weekly protest marches until Cuba frees all of its estimated 167 political prisoners.

But the group’s central issue was the release of the 52, their sons and husbands arrested in a 2003 crackdown.

Cuba wants to send the freed prisoners and their families to Spain, and so far most have accepted the offer. That means many of the Ladies in White may soon be gone.

Dissident Miriam Leiva said freeing the prisoners both “resolves a great injustice” and reduces an issue “that has stood in the way of any type of internal or external opening.”

“The Cuban people have a lot of opinions … and I think even in the goverment that this society cannot continue to be stagnant,” she said.

Ashby said the release indicated that new blood was beginning to assert itself in the Cuban leadership.

It “signals a broader change in the sense that the younger, business-oriented generation of Cubans in positions of government leadership are uncomfortable with archaic repression and the commercial complications it creates,” he said.

But it remained to be seen, experts said, how the US will respond to the prisoner release.

Washington has demanded the freeing of political prisoners as a condition for improved relations, but may not be in a mood for major change due to the detention in December of U.S. contractor Alan Gross in Cuba on suspicion of espionage.

U.S. officials and his employers have said he was not a spy but was in Cuba facilitating internet access to Jewish groups.

“I don’t know if this (U.S.) administration, timid and not very active so far regarding Cuba, will respond,” Peters said.

Welcome to the 23 de Enero barrio, home to about 100,000 people and something of a laboratory for Chavez’s nationwide socialist experiment. Here you find dogs named “Comrade Mao”, and even a “revolutionary car wash.”

“We are creating a popular bank and are going to issue a communal currency: little pieces of cardboard,” says Salvador Rooselt, a soft-spoken 24-year-old law student and community leader who often quotes Lenin and Marx.

Some 20 militant groups sometimes described as Chavez’s “storm troopers” run this urban jungle in western Caracas, where hulking concrete buildings daubed with colorful murals – one depicting Jesus Christ brandishing an AK-47 rifle – show off the neighborhood’s radical tradition.

“We are giving capitalism a punch in its social metabolism,” said Rooselt, of the Alexis Vive group, wearing its trademark bandana with the image of guerrilla icon Ernesto Che Guevara around his neck.

A deeply-rooted socialist ideology, absolute territorial control and financing from the government have allowed Alexis Vive to put into practice some of the ideas Chavez is struggling to implement in the rest of Venezuela.

Socialist stores sell milk and meat from recently nationalised producers at about a 50 percent discount. Residents do voluntary work, kids are encouraged to steer clear of drugs, and some youths have even joined a pioneer organisation modeled on similar groups in Communist Cuba.

“I’m sure President Chavez supports our initiatives and seeks to implement them at a national level,” Rooselt said.

Alexis Vive spreads its message via Radio Arsenal, an underground FM station Rooselt says was inspired by Vladimir Lenin’s experience with a political newspaper a century ago.

They are also turning their hands to urban agriculture and fish farming to feed locals, and say that the future communal bank will extend micro-credit to foster economic independence.

“Tense alliance”
Despite being a stronghold of the “chavista” movement with a massive electoral muscle that has helped the president win votes for more than a decade, 23 de Enero’s radicalism has often proved a political liability for Venezuela’s leader.

A series of attacks targeting opposition symbols such as the Globovision television station, and even the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, have led Chavez to publicly distance himself from these groups in the past – although some neighbours think they still take direct orders from “Comandante Presidente.”

George Ciccariello-Maher, a social scientist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley who has studied Venezuela’s radical movements, calls it a “tense alliance” between the president and the barrios.

“Chavez depends on the radical sectors for support, but neither side truly trusts one another … If he were to destroy them, he would be destroying his own base as well,” he said.

Gone are the days when local groups proudly displayed their automatic weapons in front of visiting reporters. Militants from Alexis Vive say their armed struggle is over.

“Ever since the revolutionary process started there haven’t been any weapons. We joined the Bolivarian militias,” said Rooselt, referring to a 35,000-strong armed force recently launched by Chavez to defend his socialist revolution.

But other more belligerent groups within 23 de Enero appear to be still armed to the teeth.

In January, one of the groups released a video to the media showing its members dressed in military attire and brandishing automatic weapons and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

They called on Chavez to clean his government of corrupt “false socialists.”

Security in 23 de Enero remains tight. Rooselt’s told reporters he received a call by cell phone the moment two reporters were spotted in the neighborhood.

That might explain why crime rates here have dropped by 95 percent, according to the militants, who say they have turned it into one of the safest places in crime-ridden Caracas.

“Spearhead of the revolution”
Known in the past as “Little Vietnam,” 23 de Enero has a long history of left-wing radicalism. The neighborhood’s name refers to January 23, 1958, the date on which military dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was toppled.

The community, mostly made up of rural workers attracted to the capital by Venezuela’s oil boom, played a key role in the 1989 riots known as the “Caracazo,” which claimed scores of lives when the army shelled buildings in the area for days.

Alexis Vive, for instance, honours community leader Alexis Gonzalez, who was killed by the police in 2002.

Berkeley’s Ciccariello-Maher calls 23 de Enero an example of “alternative sovereignty” beyond the control of the state.

“The neighborhood and movements it nurtures represent both the laboratory and spearhead of the Bolivarian Revolution … It is in 23 de Enero that the most radical forces are located, forces which drive the process forward,” he said.

The government is finding new ways of supporting 23 de Enero. In a plot behind a local market, neighbours in Che Guevara bandanas are building a state-funded brick factory equipped with Iranian-technology.

Not far from there, a group of former paratroopers who joined a failed coup d’etat by Chavez in 1992 have set up a “revolutionary car wash” next to a wall displaying a huge picture of the late Colombian guerrilla commander Marulanda.

“Here in 23 de Enero we are committed to take this process to the very end,” said cooperative member Martin Campos, a 38-year-old retired soldier sporting a yellow baseball cap with a red star. “We are chavistas. Red, very red.”

Down the road, however, some of the president’s supporters grumble among themselves at a state food shop where shelves are half-empty, vegetables rotten and meat non-existent.

After 11 years of socialist rule in Venezuela – a flagbearer for a decade of gains by the left across Latin America – trappings of revolutionary fervour are everywhere.

Scratch under the surface, though, and even many poor Venezuelans who still back Chavez are increasingly displeased at the prospect of a second straight year of economic contraction and a government unashamedly dependent on one man.

“He was our only hope, but I can’t stand seeing Venezuela become another Cuba. He’s taking this too far,” said Jose Quintero, who still calls himself “half-Chavista” but plans to abstain at the next election in protest.

Around Latin America, other hard-left leaders like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Cuba’s Raul Castro have won support among the poor with heavy spending on social programmes but have also failed to make their economies shine, to the disappointment of believers at home and abroad.

The centre-left that ruled Chile for two decades has just lost power to a conservative billionaire, Sebastian Pinera, and radical presidential candidates are losing support.

Peru’s pro-Chavez candidate Ollanta Humala and Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador both came close to winning power in 2006, but have faded since and are long shots for the next elections.

The most successful socialists seem to be those like Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who long ago toned down his rhetoric and embraced orthodox policies that helped usher in the biggest economic boom in three decades.

Mexican Economy Minister Gerardo Ruiz says greater political maturity is squeezing radicals on both sides across Latin America, which suffered a string of military coups and left-wing rebellions in the second half of the 20th century.

“Where democracy has truly taken hold, it is very difficult for there to be a radical government from either extreme, left or right,” he told the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit in early May.

So has the left had its heyday in Latin America?

Almost certainly not. Most experts are quick to distinguish between the state of the “Bolivarian” left – named for Chavez’s hero and 19th century South American liberator Simon Bolivar – and the centrist left represented by Lula and the likes of Uruguayan President Jose Mujica.

“It was never a homogenous movement,” said analyst Jimena Blanco of the Latin American Newsletters, based in Britain.

“The radical or ‘Bolivarian’ left has lost a lot of its initial strength and force. It does not have the same appeal. But the centre-left looks here to stay, even though they are more likely to alternate government with the centre-right.”

While frustrating to supporters, the radicals’ problems in Latin America are a relief to Wall Street and President Obama’s administration.

“The vast majority of governments in the hemisphere … have chosen a path which was much more toward the side of ‘let’s open up our economies, let’s try to increase transparency, let’s try to fight corruption’,” US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Craig Kelly told reporters.

“The fact that they are not seeking those Utopian solutions now is a good sign.”

Investor relief
Foreign investors have poured money into Latin America, which generally weathered the global financial crisis well and is expected to grow four percent or more this year.

“The region’s appeal is only going to grow to the extent that the more unorthodox models continue to fail,” said analyst Patrick Esteruelas, of Eurasia Group.

“One left seems to have withered, while the other has kind of consolidated itself as part of a new centre. As much as Chavez and Correa still retain an institutional grip and count on a divided opposition, they are both very much in decline.”

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez’s leftist rhetoric is hailed by Chavez, and her power base continues to be labour unions and the urban poor who have benefited from high spending on social programmes. But her policies are more ad-hoc than ideological, and her popularity is down to below 30 percent.

In Mexico, Lopez Obrador of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, lost the presidency by a whisker-thin margin in 2006, but he upset moderates by contesting the result with crippling street protests. Party divisions mean the PRD is unlikely to get close again in 2012.

Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City, has cast himself as a modern-thinking moderate leftist with an eye to running for the PRD in 2012, and he says the left needs to combine its old emphasis on social support with solid economic policies.

“Brazil is a good example,” he told the summit, referring to Lula’s model of targeted social spending with market-friendly policies.

“I don’t think we can repeat here what Chavez did.”

In Colombia, the radicalism of neighbours Venezuela and Ecuador is a turnoff to voters, with all candidates in May’s presidential vote stressing free-market principles.

Bolivia, perhaps, defies the trend or any simplistic tags, with Chavez ally President Evo Morales – the nation’s first Indian head of state – remaining popular and managing 3.4 percent growth in 2009 despite the global crisis.

“I would put Morales in a class apart,” said Esteruelas. “It is as much an ethno-indigenous political current as an ideological one that he heads.”

Nobody, however, is predicting an early exit for the radical left’s big men like Chavez, Castro or Correa despite the apparent failure of their model of nationalisations, subsidies and greater state control. All have solid power bases, even if there is dissatisfaction among their supporters and fewer admirers abroad.

“I do not see them fading away. It is not like we are going to wake up at the end of this year and Chavez will not be there,” Blanco said. “But it’s also clear now that Latin America is not going to descend into the 1960s or 70s again.”

It was one of the few public events in which the often stern-looking Rousseff showed a more human face and appeared without her mentor and political benefactor, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Buoyed by a roaring economy and the immense popularity of Lula, his chief of staff Rousseff has narrowed the gap in opinion polls with front-runner Jose Serra, the governor of Sao Paulo state from the opposition PSDB party.

But analysts caution that the race has yet to begin in earnest and Rousseff must still emerge from Lula’s long shadow to consolidate her own image and define her policies to win the election on October 3.

“She has yet to present herself to the Brazilian electorate,” said Christopher Garman, Latin America analyst with Eurasia Group consultants in New York.

“And she has yet to learn to do so convincingly.”

Her first challenge will be to convince the rank and file of the Workers’ Party, or PT, that she is as good as Lula says. The leftist former union leader, who is barred from running for a third straight term, has virtually imposed Rousseff’s candidacy despite grumbling in the party, which she only joined in 2001.

Proxy for Lula?
In recent months the 64-year-old Lula has accompanied his protege every step of the way, from ribbon-cutting events and television spots to closed-door cabinet meetings.

As a result, her name-recognition in opinion polls has shot up but many Brazilians still see her as a proxy for Lula rather than a candidate in her own right, pollsters say.

“I don’t know much about her but she’d be a continuation of Lula,” said Jose Silva dos Santos, a 52-year-old taxi driver in downtown Brasilia, echoing a common view.

Despite Rousseff’s stiff public persona, Lula thinks her management skills will make her a good president. He also says Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, is ready for a woman president after he shattered the class barrier to become its first leader that didn’t hail from an elite background.

Still, there has been speculation in political circles that Rousseff, 62, would simply be an “interim president” until Lula can run again in 2014, a claim he dismissed in an interview with O Estado de S.Paulo.

“I have total confidence in Dilma, that she’ll know how to do the right things for this country,” he said.

Lula’s predecessor and longtime political rival Fernando Henrique Cardoso, also of Serra’s PSDB party, publicly belittled Rousseff recently, referring to her as a mere puppet of her boss, foreshadowing a likely theme in the campaign ahead.

Policy risk
Most investors see little risk that either of the leading candidates would stray far from Lula’s market-friendly policies, though some prefer Serra for his executive experience and the PSDB’s more centrist political stance.

Rousseff and much of the PT favor a larger government role in the economy, mainly through big state enterprises.

“This talk of government-induced growth and big state enterprises has us worried. It has failed in the past,” said Rodrigo Nogueira, a partner in the Brasilia-based construction firm JC Gontijo Engenheria.

“She needs to address these concerns soon.”

The daughter of Bulgarian immigrants and a left-wing militant in her youth, the gruff career civil servant is often referred to in political circles as the “iron lady.”

For much of last year, she stuck to an intense agenda while battling lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, of which doctors say she has been cured.

But Rousseff remains a political novice who often struggles to connect with her audience, a potential pitfall that even her supporters acknowledge.

“Dilma doesn’t have the skills like someone who ran in several elections,” PT president-elect Jose Eduardo Dutra told O Globo newspaper.

“Her opponent also lacks charisma, so it evens out,” he added, referring to the often dour-faced Serra.

Lula’s blessing and proven political skills are sure to work in her favor in the campaign. But Rousseff faces a formidable opponent in Serra, and her stance on some controversial issues could pose problems.

Opposition legislators have summoned her to testify on her support for legalising abortion, a delicate act in an overwhelmingly Catholic society.

Analysts say Rousseff’s lack of charisma and political savvy may not cost her the election but, if she wins, it could make governing with notoriously volatile allies difficult.

“She has difficulty dealing with politicians – voters won’t notice that but her allies may jump on it,” said Cristiano Noronha, head of political Arko Advice.

“Becoming hostage to her allies is Dilma’s biggest risk.”

President Obama has proposed to slow Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter programme, the Pentagon’s costliest purchase at about
$300bn over the next 25 years.

The Defense Department wants
$10.7bn to continue F-35 development and to buy 43 of the radar-evading
fighters in fiscal 2011, down from $10.8bn this fiscal year, according
a Pentagon budget overview.

The following is a list of how Obama would fund other major weapons programs:

 *
The Navy would spend $1.9bn to buy 22 Boeing Co F/A-18E/F Super Hornet
fighter jets, up from $1.7bn for 18 in the fiscal 2010 budget enacted
by Congress.

 * The Navy would spend $1.1bn to buy 12 Boeing
E/A-18G carrier-based electronic attack aircraft, down from $1.7bn for
22 this year.

 * The Pentagon would spend $1.86bn for new
unmanned Predator and Reaper planes built by privately held General
Atomics, up from $1.18bn.

 * The Army would spend $1.25bn on
Boeing CH-47 helicopters, and $587m on AH-64 Apache Longbow
helicopters, also built by Boeing.

 * The Air Force budget
includes $864m to begin replacing its aging KC-135 refueling planes, a
competition that pits Boeing against Northrop Grumman Corp and its
European partner EADS.

 * The Pentagon would spend $3.4bn to
sustain the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle program in fiscal
2011 after adding $1bn to complete the programme this year.

 *
The Pentagon also would spend $9.9bn on ballistic missile defense
programmes, up from $9.2bn. The funding includes $1.56bn for Lockheed’s
Aegis missile defense system, $1.3bn for the company’s Terminal High
Altitude Area Defense missile system and $1.3bn on a ground-based
midcourse defense programme run by Boeing.

 * The budget would
spend $12.9bn for munitions and missiles, including $1.2bn for Trident
II ballistic missiles built by Lockheed, more than $700m for Standard
and Tomahawk missiles made by Raytheon Co and $253m for
precision-targeted Joint Direct Attack Munitions made by Boeing.

 *
The budget includes over $25bn in procurement and research funding for
Navy shipbuilding programmes. These include $2.73bn for a new carrier
built by Northrop, $2.97bn for DDG-51 Aegis destroyers built by
Northrop and General Dynamics Corp and $5.4 billion for Virginia-class
attack submarines, also built by GD and Northrop.

 * Spending
on space programmes totals $9.9bn in the fiscal 2011 base budget and
war supplemental budget, a decline of just under one percent from a
year earlier. The request includes $911m for a next-generation
communications satellite built by Lockheed, $598m for an additional
Advanced Extremely High Frequency Satellite, also built by Lockheed and
$1.2bn for launch vehicles built by a Lockheed-Boeing joint venture.